There is a significant moment in the life of director Steven Spielberg that does not appear in his last feature film, the semi-autobiographical film The Fabelmans (2022.) The director preferred to recount this memory in interviews and recollections about the origins of Close Encounters of the Third Kind (1977), one of his most popular films and which is marking its 45^th anniversary this year.

In his reminiscence, Spielberg said that when he was a child, his father woke him up at dawn to put him in the family car and took him to a field to watch a shower of shooting stars.

The feeling of admiration for the cosmos and the fascination with the idea of ​​being visited by beings from another world, such as those in films that Spielberg saw in morning screenings in his youth – The Day the Earth Stood Still (1951), The Thing from Another World (1951), and War of the Worlds (1953) led the artist to take his amateur camera and shoot Firelight.

The budding filmmaker was 18 years old when he made the film that even had a day of commercial exhibition in a local theater in his town.

In his remarks on the 4K Blu-ray and anniversary theatrical release of Close Encounters of the Third Kind, Spielberg explained that his story about alien encounters was to be his second theatrical feature film after The Sugarland Express (1974), which garnered him attention at the Cannes International Film Festival.

Problems in the development of that script led Steven to jump on the Jaws boat whose producers at Universal Pictures, Richard D. Zanuck and David Brown, were already waiting for him after seeing the success of his Movie of the Week for ABC, Duel (1971).

Spielberg had already been working on a script since 1974 with screenwriter Paul Schrader (writer of Taxi Driver) ) giving him the Firelight references. The idea was that more than a science fiction story, the story should deal with the sense of suspicion forged in the Watergate era, when the common citizen wondered what other secrets the government kept from him. The project title at the time was titled Watch the Skies.

When Spielberg released Jaws, Schrader returned with a script centered on a veteran of the Blue Book project, destined to find out about the UFO phenomenon, whose sense of guilt led him to obsess over the idea that flying saucers could exist. The problem was that the story didn’t have the characters dealing with the presence and arrival of aliens, even when the script was retitled Kingdom Come.

Following Schrader’s firing, came a string of writers including David Giler, Hal Barwood, and Matthew Robins, who suggested to Spielberg that part of the heart of his Watch the Skies might be the abduction of a child by aliens.

The filmmaker went back to the ideas he had in Firelight and discovered that he needed his lead to be an ordinary man in extraordinary situations. To that plot line, Steven added his fascination with the theme song “When You Wish Upon a Star” from Walt Disney’s animated Pinocchio (1940) which he saw so many times in his childhood.

With the script in his hands, Spielberg learned that the specialist in the UFO phenomenon, J. Allen Hynek, had classified the three types of close encounters with alien beings: the first, you see them from afar; in the second, they are manifested with objects or traces in nature, and in the third, there is contact. This classification fascinated Spielberg, who thus renamed his film Close Encounters of the Third Kind.

Producers Michael and Julia Phillips, winners of the Best Picture Oscar for The Sting )1973) and behind  Martin Scorsese‘s Taxi Driver, took the lead on Spielberg’s project, with Columbia Pictures as partners. The director of Jaws benefited from the fact that his film had become the highest-grossing in history at that time and with that feat, he managed to not be denied any of the financing and vision that he had for Close Encounters.

While Spielberg thought legendary star Steve McQueen was the ideal lead, he himself felt the actor couldn’t bring the sentimentality that Roy Neary’s character should bring to the screen as a family man who is overwhelmed by the presence of UFOs around his neighborhood.

After spending half a year with actor Richard Dreyfuss during the filming of Jaws, Spielberg felt that he could be his Roy Neary, someone capable of waking up his family at dawn, as his father did, and taking them to hunt lights in heaven. Close Encounters thus became a story about the dreams of a family man to reach something beyond himself which would give his life a new meaning.

 

 

Along with Dreyfuss, Spielberg cast actress Teri Garr as Neary’s wife, Ronnie, as well as Melinda Dillon, who would play the mother whose son is abducted by aliens. The boy was Cary Guffey and his look of amazement at the unknown in Close Encounters was the result of Steven himself pulling tricks to provoke reactions. Among the filmmaker’s ploys – dressing up as a gorilla behind the camera.

The icing on the cake for Close Encounters was Spielberg’s invitation to the leading filmmaker of the New Wave of French Cinema, François Truffaut whom he hired to play a sociologist coming to the United States with the idea of ​​interpreting the possible meeting of two worlds.

Special effects were handled by Douglas Trumbull, who had won an Oscar for his spaceships and characters floating in zero gravity in 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968). The cinematographer was Hungarian Vilmos Zsigmond, and editing was handled by Michael Khan, who would become Spielberg’s regular editor.

Music was also central to Close Encounters as it was the language chosen by aliens to communicate with characters on Earth. Spielberg asked the Golden Globe winner of Best Original Score for Jaws, John Williams, to come up with a simple yet repeatable melody.

The legendary musician thought that five notes would be enough to achieve this effect. After experimenting with 300 possible combinations, he returned with the iconic Close Encounters theme.

Spielberg also made sure that part of the tune from “When You Wish Upon a Star” could be incorporated into Williams’ work. There was no doubt that Close Encounters would be focused on that call of the stars and that in the great climax – what many moviegoers consider to be a quasi-religious experience – the music and the encounter of aliens with humans becomes a celebration of the encounter between two cultures.

Shot in different locations, from the fields in India to the heart of Hollywood in Burbank, California, from the desert of New Mexico to the Devil’s Tower in Wyoming, the film that should have cost $2.7 million ended up costing $19.4 million.

The scenes of the descent of the ship were shot in a hangar, while the aliens were designed by the great Carlo Rambaldi, involved in 1976’s King Kong, who devised those dancing girls dressed as aliens and were photographed against the light.

Released on November 16, 1977, Close Encounters of the Third Kind built on the success of that summer’s Star Wars by George Lucas for the audience to conceive of the universe as a place to live, with positive promises. Spielberg garnered four Golden Globe nominations, including Best Picture and Best Music, seeing his film become, like Jaws, a part of pop culture.

In addition, Close Encounter of the Third Kind inspired him to conceive E.T., The Extraterrestrial (1982) under the concept of “what if an alien was abandoned by mistake?”

Producers like Chris Carter have pointed out that they were inspired by Spielberg’s film to create shows like The X-Files, which deal with conspiracy theories. Filmmakers J.J. Abrams (Super 8) and Denis Villeneuve (Arrival), have said that Close Encounters deeply influenced their work.

Forty-five years after its premiere, Close Encounters has three versions to be appreciated in digital formats: the one that premiered in 1977, the one that was re-released in 1980 as a Special Edition that contained a scene inside the mothership that Spielberg included in the original, and the one considered the director’s cut that brings together the best of the two previous versions and that Steven edited himself.

Close Encounter of the Third Kind, one of the few films to feature Spielberg as a screenwriter, is listed in the Library of Congress as a Legacy of the Best of American Cinema and ranked among the top 100 films by the American Film Institute.

Spielberg has said that when he filmed the movie, he had not yet become a father and that now he does not like to see Roy abandoning his children. For some biographers, that scene is the farewell the filmmaker gives to his father on that starry night, after the divorce of his family.

 

Translation by Mario Amaya